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How Trackmatic gained real-time visibility with Synthesis

Published • 06 October 2022

Software Development

Twelve years ago, David Slotow founded Trackmatic. He never imagined how his company would evolve.

Trackmatic is a software solution provider. It builds technology for companies that want to run warehouse and fleet resources such as transport and warehousing companies. Its solution is there to drive efficiencies within the supply chain around distribution. The initial part of its evolution was around on-road execution, getting a better sense of what drivers were doing within the vehicles and how they were servicing customers.

“We’ve coupled that with the actual operation within the warehouse, within the yard to look at how warehouses are loading trucks, positioning trucks, making sure they leave on time,” explains Slotow.

“When we set out on this journey of this business, we didn’t imagine that we would be this always-on 24-hour company. Our clients depend on us.

Warehouses run 24 hours, There’s no downtime. There’s no system maintenance. We have to have an environment today where we can completely make updates and changes and patching, etc. without any disruption to the core service.”

The Challenge

In the last years, there has been exponential growth in online shopping and deliveries.

“What we’re finding is that there’s a lot more pressure on the supply chain to get supplies to the stores. Interestingly enough, where we don’t operate is strongly on the last mile space or the home deliveries. There’s a lot of innovation and technology that’s been introduced to that space, but with that comes the pressure to replenish the stores.

“If you look at, for example, what I think is the leading solution, Checkers 60 60, there’s pressure to get the stock into the stores in order to fulfill orders and to have no stock outages. So where we place is in that middle-mile and first-mile space where there are more and more companies that have larger trucks that need to be optimising and utilising them to the maximum.

“We focus on making sure that our clients have the visibility, the insights to make the right decisions, reduce the turnaround times at the stores that they’re delivering to and get those vehicles back faster and fill them up.

“As a technology business, we recognise that we have a single platform. It’s a software-as-a-service solution. We had historically always built our technology on-premise because of the performance requirements of our technology that we adopted and the types of operations that our clients were using. We now needed real-time, always-up solutions.”

The Solution

Trackmatic reached out to Synthesis, recognising that there was a need for AWS Cloud in the future evolution of its business.

“Whilst we understood that on-premise is important, there was an area of flex that we would be needing.

“We presented Synthesis with quite a challenge in that typically they’re taking people from on-to cloud.

“We saw it as a core competency for us to have on-premise with a level of storage and data processing as well as access to the cloud, in doing so we got the best of both worlds, but it wasn’t a pure cloud verse on-premise migration. It was a case of saying, how do we do both?”

The Results

Synthesis helped Trackmatic to operate in both the cloud and on-premise environments with the cloud giving Trackmatic security and real-time data.

“The level of real-time visibility in our yard execution space, dealing with supplier deliveries into distribution centers in South Africa, customers want to know as soon as that vehicle is on-premise from the time they scanned in at the gate to the loading bay, every movement of a truck, they want those time and motion studies. They want to make real-time decisions.

“If a vehicle’s arriving too early and there’s a slot available, they want to bring it onto the warehouse floor.

“That’s the value that we bring to our clients, is that they don’t have to look out across a yard or phone someone or check if they can phone a transporter to see if that vehicle’s actually there.

“The cloud has really given us an opportunity to scale. We’re in a very opportune place in terms of the market. There’s more and more need for these types of solutions. We’re seeing it in the competition that’s come to the market. We’ve always been ahead of our industry, and very innovative with our clients.

“For us now, it’s really taking advantage of the opportunities that present themselves. We’re in the right place.”